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Born into a long-established Philadelphia family, he graduated from Harvard University with a law degree and worked from 1911-12 as the private secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. During World War II, he served as U.S. attorney general under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Then after the war, President Harry S. Truman appointed him as the chief American judge at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, prosecuting the highest-ranking officers of the defeated Nazi regime.